Archive of Our Own ^beta

01. [GAME]
The first time Neku walked into WildKAT after the last Game, he was breathless from the distance he had crossed. It was his second time leaving the house after his post-Game recovery (the first being his meet-up with his new friends), and he was still anaemic, his body weak from the things it had done.

The café seemed a little more difficult to locate than he remembered, tucked away in an alleyway, and had it always been so shrouded in shadows? But every inch of the way there had been written into the soles of Neku’s feet, and he found it exactly where he expected it to be.

The decal was still there (he could not find the decal on any other store, with waking eyes) and he touched it as he approached, out of habit. He paused and took a deep breath before placing his hand on the doorknob, pushing it open with a soft jangle of a hand-rigged bell, and there was the man who was not the Composer, casually polishing a green mug behind the bar.

Neku found himself rooted to the ground; time slowed and congealed in the air around him.

“Hey there,” CAT said, tilting his head.

He’d last spoken to the man – well, he’d been in bed for a week, and he’d not seen him at all the third week, and –

“Sixteen days, give or take a few hours.” Hanekoma put the newly-cleaned mug down on the bar, reached down and retrieved a coffee pot. With an adept hand and eye he poured it, then reached down again and placed a bowl of soup next to it. “Been a while. Looks like you could use something that sticks to your bones – c’mon in and eat, yeah?”

“I –” The room temperature returned to normal. “—I suppose. Yeah.”

And that was all that needed to be said.

02. [AND MOUSE]
Things of that nature get easier, slowly. But Neku had questions and Hanekoma was always short on time, which sped things up significantly.

On the fourth day after his recovery, Neku found his way back to the café, where Hanekoma was waiting for him, with another cup of coffee and a stack of pancakes. Neku knew better than to ask about the food. He sat down, had a mouthful.

“I saw you,” he said, to CAT’s back. Hanekoma looked over from the espresso machine. “Right at the end. There was a flash of white after I dropped the gun and before I blacked out, and I saw you and Joshua.”

“Well, I’m never one to turn down a kid in need of help,” was the reply. “But yeah, I was there.”

“ – But you’re not the Composer.”

“No.”

“ – And you’re not – whatever Shades was.”

“The Conductor? Nope.”

“But you know all about the Game. You told Shiki and me – way back then – that you were there to…watch over? Who – why?”

“Aah, now you’re wandering into secret territory. How ‘bout we change the subject?”

There is something dissonant going on in Neku’s brain, because he wants to trust the man with cool eyes more than anything, and yet in his nightmares he’s been breathless and dying on the rooftop of Pork City. So he changes the subject as asked, and the two chat about schoolwork and shopping until Neku has to go home.

(Those Secret Reports were not for Neku, they were for you, Player.)

03. [WE PLAY FOR KEEPS]
“All of them,” Neku says, sipping cautiously. “All of them were Players.”

“Except Joshua. And Megumi, come to think of it. Got that one straight from the RG.”

“…Really?”

“He was a lot like you,” Hanekoma says, wiping the countertop with a dirty rag, and the sound of his voice tells Neku that the line of conversation is finished. Once again, Neku wonders: was he suffering? Or was he too closed-off to know?

“…D’you lose your Entry Fee?”

“Yeah. – Usually, although there are sometimes…special circumstances. It takes a special kind of crazy to sign up for that sort of job, y’know?”

“I know. …Will you tell me what their Entry Fees were?”

Hanekoma sighs. “I s’ppose I owe you that much.” He puts down the rag and starts counting on his fingers. “Higashizawa was always thin and sickly, longed to be more – soldierly, yeah? They gave him that body of his, hoping he would understand that some things don’t come from your fists. He didn’t. Went mad with power and killed fifteen Players on his first day. Megumi hired him straight away. Kinda puts his obsession with Miss Misaki into perspective, eh?”

“…I guess.”

“Lessee. Uzuki had really pretty black hair, all the way down to her waist. Really pretty, really vain. They took that. Kariya – ”

“—Lollipop?”

“ – Yeah, he was really ambitious, always had a game plan about movin' up by stepping on people around him. Uh, Konishi was exactly the person you remember her being, they made her all spaced-out, couldn't string two thoughts together, hoped she'd learn to trust folks around her. Her and her Partner were about to go down fighting the GM when Megs offered her brain back if she’d kill her Partner as a declaration of loyalty. She did.”

“…Huh. What about Pi-Face?”

“Sho was – special.” Out of the corner of his eye, Neku notices that Hanekoma has braced himself on the bar. “He found this place all on his own, back when he was alive. Feisty even back then, but I liked him – used to tag over my murals with his own art. Kid was a genius. Thought about groomin’ him to take over the business, but he got hit by a car with his nose in an art book, and that’s life. ”

“I, uh.” Hanekoma is looking a little disturbed, an emotion crossing his face that Neku cannot name or place, and it troubles him greatly. “I’m – sorry?”

He shrugs. “They wanted to rip the create out of his brain, but all they did was give him a peek into the stuff our world is made of – the program, as it is. Gave him eyes that saw no beauty, only the code. The human brain can only take so much of that. A week of it left him in – well, in the state you found him in.”

“Batshit crazy.”

“We were gonna revive him, but he begged us not too – couldn’t face the world, after what he’d been through. And all I could do was make sure he ended up a lion…”

Hanekoma seems drained, and the conversation moves to a safer place: Neku talks about something he saw on the way over, and Hanekoma polishes glasses and listens. He is very, very far away.

04. [EMPTINESS AND]
“Nah, not really,” Neku is saying. “He walked out on my mom when I was really young.”

“Ah.” Today they’re sharing shots of espresso. Neku thinks that Hanekoma is somewhere around his tenth, although he can’t quite tell – and he doesn’t know how healthy that is. Meanwhile, he’s still working on his first, taking long breaks between sips. Hanekoma always chides his weak coffee game, but Neku needs time to cut the taste. “Shucks, Phones. That’s quite a downer.”

“I…don’t think about it too much.” Neku sips, tastes bitterness and acceptance, like someone trying to get away and not quite making it. And how can he put it in words, the way he feels when he talks to Mr. H? He thinks of Sunday school, God the Mother-Father, the nurturer and the judge, who would carry you on His back one day and rain fire on your home on the next.

And where does that leave Neku?

“Well, people can suck sometimes, eh?”

“—I have this weird dream a lot,” Neku says, changing the subject rather suddenly. “I’m on the roof of Pork City, begging you to let me help you, and you –” Neku chokes, and the room goes very quiet. “—You said I would, and you took out two feathers, and –”

“—That’s enough, Neku.”

“—I just – don’t – know – who you are,” he says, through gritted teeth. “Are you a Reaper? Why can I see you? Are you a Composer like Joshua? Are you –”

“—That’s enough.” Hanekoma has come around the bar, to stand right beside Neku. “Lissen, Phones. Th’ world’s a great big place, and we all have a place in it. D’you know what we call your power?” He puts a hand on Neku’s head; it’s a startlingly intimate gesture, and when Neku looks up, he notices that Hanekoma has gold eyes with an incredibly dilated pupil. He’d never noticed that before. “We call it Psychomancy – speakin’ with the dead. It’s rare, and powerful, and unstable. All of us had our eyes on you for years, so when Joshua went on the offensive, I knew we had to do something…”

There is a shift in the air, a sudden drop in the temperature. “There are some things you may not know, even at the end of it all. – But you’ll have to make do with what you have. Remember what I told you, back then?”

“—Trust your partner?”

“No, the other one.”

“…‘Enjoy the moment’?”

Hanekoma shakes his head. Neku wrinkles his brow, confused, but a sudden rush of recognition rips through him like an electric shock. He sees an empty white space, an angel’s wing, and dark black blood. “…That the day would come sooner than either of us expect?”

“I came back for you,” Hanekoma says, ruffling Neku’s hair, and that is that.

05. [PSYCHOMANCY]
It’s a painful decision, but Mr. H’s lease on the building technically has eight more months on it, and it would be a waste to let the place fade into static. So Neku, winglets still tender in the wake of his second death, rolls up his sleeves and gets to work. At the very least the building can serve as a mausoleum.

“I still don’t know who you are,” Neku says, as he plugs in the coffee maker. By some miracle the plumbing is still working, despite the broken glass and scorched wood that marks Hanekoma’s final struggle, and he fills the machine enough to make two cups: one for him, one for the dead. He’s brought in a bag of pre-ground beans from a small stall in Dogenzaka. He pulls a feather from his back, chars it with a fistful of energy, and adds it to the mix; soon, the sound of percolation and the smell of coffee slides up the walls.

“…But I trust you.” And how could he not? Even after his disappearance, something about the man still lived on, in the way Shibuya breathed. Neku had taken to tagging the empty spaces on the walls and streets, if only to hear the last threads of Hanekoma’s mad song. He hears thoughts and rumours about CAT’s metamorphosis into something new. And while he’s not about to dispel those rumours, it makes him happy, and very, very sad.

“I think I understand, now,” he says, as he pours the brewed coffee into a mug he’s brought from home. It’s one of the few things Joshua allowed him to take from his old life. He pours a second cup, leaves it on the bar. “You told me that alone, we face limitations. And you knew your limitations, because you were alone. You were the loneliest guy in Shibuya. You were lonelier than I was, so you knew who I was.”

Even Joshua, it seemed, did not know much about the man who had lived and then died. “You…knew things. And you couldn’t tell anyone about them. So you looked at Pi-Face, and then at me, and saw people wrapped up inside their own heads, so much that you could trust yourself to talk to them.”

He takes a drink. He’ll never get it to taste exactly like Hanekoma’s brew, but such is life: everything changes, and nothing is truly lost. “…It’s bitter.” We sweeten bitter things so we can choke them down. “You trusted us with your life.” And Neku knows that Hanekoma is gone forever, knows with the part of him that was born the moment he woke up in the Scramble Crossing, and he learned to speak with the dead. “You took your secrets with you, wherever you went.” And Neku knows that part of him will never be lost. Hanekoma is tattooed into his skin, printed on each one of his atoms: like the power series of real numbers between 0 and 1, he’s a handful of emptiness that’s bigger than the universe.

“Well, I’ll be enough for both of you,” Neku says, toasting to the empty air. “You guys were crazy. Thanks.”